Inhabited - chapter 8 (with images) (Patreon)

The plastic flange of the breast pump creates a cold seal against her skin. It pulls, releases, pulls again. The motor block vibrates against the wood of the desk, a relentless mechanical grinding that travels straight up through her forearms.

Whir-suck. Whir-suck.

It is her second morning in Jersey City. She stares at the red text of the NovaSphere ticketing queue on the primary monitor.

The right breast is currently attached to the machine. The left is tucked into the cup flap of the nursing bra, waiting its turn. She tries to ignore the indignity of the extraction. She is tethered to a milking machine by a length of clear plastic tubing, watching a thin spray of white fluid hit the inside of the funnel and run down into a bottle. It never gets less jarring.

A chime sounds in the headset resting over her left ear.

"NovaSphere support, my name is Ruth. How can I help you today?"

"My rig's not working right," a voice says. A teenager. Bored, irritated. "It's lagging by like, two seconds."

She pulls up the user's diagnostic log while the pump yanks at her nipple. "I'm looking at your firmware version. You're two patches behind. You need to push the update through the main console interface, not the headset."

"I tried that."

"Try it again while holding the sync button."

She mutes the mic. The apartment is holding steady at a manageable hum. Mia sits on the rug surrounded by tinker toys. Jacob is in his bedroom down the hall, playing with plastic building blocks - the school called to confirm he's still on the recovery list, no fever for twenty-four hours required before he can come back.

The pump finishes its cycle. She reaches under her shirt, breaks the suction seal with a finger, and swaps the flange to the left breast. The immediate rush of cold air against the wet right nipple makes her wince. She turns the motor back on.

She unmutes. "Did the amber light flash?"

"Yeah. Wait. Okay, it's updating."

"Give it ten minutes before you put the rig back on," she says. She clicks the ticket closed.

Another chime. A forgotten password. Then a hardware failure she has to escalate to Tier-2. Reset codes and firmware complaints.

She hits the status button to pause the queue and stands. She turns off the pump motor. The silence in the living room is abrupt.

She unscrews the plastic bottle, seals it with a lid, and wipes a stray drop of milk off her stomach with the back of her hand. She pulls the t-shirt down.

She goes to the bathroom. She doesn't bother to close the door all the way. Mia is on the rug. Jacob is in his room. She sits and pees with the door ajar - Ruth's habit, not hers, the mother's adjustment to never being alone for long. The urgency of it has been there for the last forty minutes, background noise she only notices now that she's allowed herself to notice it. She wipes, washes her hands, and takes the milk to the refrigerator.

Mia has dropped the rubber ring. The baby is staring at the ceiling, her eyes heavy, the frantic chewing replaced by a slow, sleepy blinking.

The silence stretches.

It is the wrong kind of silence.

A five-year-old playing with blocks makes noise. Plastic clattering against wood. Small destructive sound effects. Humming. There is no humming coming from the hallway.

She puts the bottle on the counter. She walks down the hall.

"Jacob?"

The bedroom door is open. The floor is covered in plastic bricks. Jacob is not there.

She checks the bathroom. Empty. The shower curtain is pulled back, revealing dry, graying grout.

A cold spike of adrenaline hits her bloodstream.

She walks back into the living room. "Jacob."

She looks at the front door.

The deadbolt is thrown open.

She locked it. She remembers locking it after putting the kids to bed. But Ruth knows what she didn't - the heavy brass deadbolt is sticky. You have to pull the door hard by the handle while turning the lock to get the metal cylinder to actually seat in the frame. If you just turn it, it feels locked. It isn't.

The door is cracked open. A thin sliver of the hallway visible.

The fear is not the kind of fear she has had in any other body. Her skin prickles. Her mouth goes dry. The hands are already reaching for the door.

She rips it open.

The stairwell is empty. The smell of old cooking oil and dust hangs in the freezing air.

"Jacob!"

Her voice echoes off the painted cinderblock walls. It sounds thin and desperate.

She runs to the railing. Looks down. The stairwell wraps around a central gap, a straight drop down to the ground floor lobby. The gray tile at the bottom is empty. No small broken body.

She runs down the stairs. She is wearing only socks. The grit on the concrete steps bites into her soles.

She hits the first-floor landing. The heavy entry door leading out to the street is closed. She shoves it. It's locked from the outside. He couldn't have pulled the heavy handle down to get to the sidewalk. He doesn't have the leverage.

Unless someone opened it for him.

Her breathing is ragged. Her breasts swing and yank hard against her ribs with every step, the bra doing nothing to brace the weight at this speed, and she is barely aware of the pain.

She turns and runs back up. Past her own floor. To the third floor.

"Jacob!"

Nothing. The third-floor hallway is a stretch of dirty carpet and three closed doors. She runs to the end. She checks the door leading to the roof access. Padlocked.

She runs back down to the second floor. Her heart is hammering so hard she can feel it in her teeth.

Where. Where is he?

She checks her own apartment again. He could have slipped back in. She tears through the bedroom, throws open the closet, looks under the dipping mattress.

"Jacob!"

Mia starts wailing in the living room, triggered by the screaming.

She runs back out into the hallway.

Twelve minutes. Enough time for a child to vanish.

She runs up to the third floor again. She is losing her mind. The adrenaline is mixing with her crushing fatigue, creating a sickening vertigo.

She reaches the third-floor landing.

She looks to the left, into a small alcove near the trash chute that she hadn't checked because it was too shadowed.

Jacob is sitting on the floor.

He has a small red plastic car in his hand. He is running it back and forth over a dark, dried stain on the floor, making a quiet vroom noise with his mouth.

He looks up at her.

"Hi," he says.

The relief and rage hit at the same moment. Her legs give. Her hand finds the cinderblock wall.

She crosses the distance in two strides. She grabs him by the upper arm. She doesn't mean to grab him that hard, but the body is shaking with adrenaline and the grip is iron.

"Ow," he says, his face crumpling.

"Do not ever leave the apartment." Her voice is shaking. It doesn't sound like Ruth.

She practically drags him down the stairs. He is crying now, dragging his feet, the plastic car clattering down the concrete steps ahead of them. She doesn't stop to pick it up.

She pulls him into the apartment. She slams the door. She pulls the handle hard toward her and twists the deadbolt. A solid, metallic thunk as it seats into the frame. She throws the chain lock at the top for good measure.

Mia is screaming in the crib.

She lets go of Jacob. He stands in the narrow hallway, sobbing, rubbing his arm where she grabbed him.

She walks into the kitchen.

She sinks down onto the cracked linoleum floor. Back against the lower cabinets. Pulls her knees up and rests her forehead on her arms.

She can't breathe. The air won't go deep enough. Her hands are shaking and won't stop.

Jacob cries in the hallway. Mia shrieks in the living room. The bottle of freshly pumped milk sits on the counter directly above her head, slowly cooling to room temperature. She waits for the shaking to stop. It takes nearly twenty minutes.

Eventually, the crying changes pitch. Jacob's sobs turn into intermittent, wet hiccups. Mia's wailing drops into a tired, rhythmic fussing.

She forces herself up. The linoleum has leached the heat from her legs. She gets the milk and puts it in the fridge. She walks into the living room, picks Mia up from the floor mat, and shifts the warm weight onto her hip.

She walks over to Jacob. He shrinks back slightly against the wall.

The guilt comes up before the words do. She kneels, balancing the baby.

"I'm sorry I grabbed you," she says. She doesn't know if that's the right thing to say. She says it anyway.

He looks at the floor.

"You scared me," she says. "You can't go out there by yourself."

He nods, wipes his nose on his sleeve.

She takes them both to the sofa. She turns the television on. A bright, loud cartoon fills the screen. Jacob climbs up and sits rigidly on the far cushion.

She sits down with Mia. The baby roots against her chest immediately.

She pulls the t-shirt up. The left breast is still partially full. Mia latches. The pinch. The rush.

The letdown hits, and this time the body just goes slack with it - shoulders, jaw, the tight coil behind her sternum. The frantic terrified buzzing in the skull slows to a crawl. She leans her head back against the cheap fabric of the sofa and closes her eyes.

She feeds the baby until Mia is completely limp, dead weight against her stomach. She carries her to the bedroom and lays her in the crib.

She walks back out. Jacob is asleep on the sofa, his mouth slightly open, the cartoon still blaring.

The apartment is finally, actually quiet. She looks at the clock on the stove. One-thirty in the afternoon.

The exhaustion is a physical weight pressing down on her collarbones. She feels like she has lived an entire lifetime since she woke up. The thirst is back, scraping in the back of her throat. She drinks two glasses of water straight from the tap.

She walks into the bedroom.

She closes the door. She turns the heavy brass lock. The click is loud and definitive.

In the corner, the immersion rig sits waiting.

She needs to leave Jersey City. She needs to not be a mother for an hour. She walks over and picks up the headset.

She lies down. She slides the halo array over her temples. She pulls the heavy visor down over her eyes.

The white ring growing larger. The pulse against the skull.

The transition is immediate. Ruth's body drops away. The breasts gone, the sore back gone, the lurching adrenaline in the hands gone. Her avatar walks. Her avatar stands without negotiating.

The lobby loads. Polished concrete, warm lighting.

She doesn't pause to look at the other avatars. She brings up the navigation interface. She keys in the routing path. The unlisted community board.

The environment renders.

The basement room. The rough, gray-green walls. The diffuse, sourceless lighting.

She spawns near the entrance and steps forward.

She expects the same reception she got when she arrived as Diane. The cold silence. The immediate suspicion of a stranger.

But she isn't Diane. She is inside Ruth's account.

Her avatar is a slightly idealized version of Ruth's physical body. Tall, the skin smoother than it is in real life, the hair long and heavy, falling in waves that don't behave the way real hair does. She wears a simple gray sweater and jeans. She catches her own movement in a reflection on a polished surface and stops for half a second, looking. The avatar is wearing Ruth's body without any of Ruth's wear.

"Hey, Ruth," a man says from a cluster of chairs near the wall.

She stops.

He is an avatar in a standard-issue leather jacket skin. He waves.

"Hey," she says. Ruth's voice, smoothed and processed by the system's audio filters.

"Did they fix the ticketing glitch yet?" a woman asks, walking past. "I tried to submit a bug report this morning and it kept kicking me back to the lobby."

"Not yet," she says, working off Ruth's morning shift. "They're patching it tonight."

"Figures," the woman says, rolling her digital eyes, and moves on.

She stands there.

Ruth belongs here. The recognition is offhand, casual — the leather-jacket guy doesn't think it's strange that Ruth's avatar is in the room. He thinks Ruth is in the room. In the walkup Ruth is a single mother running a conveyor belt of small demands. In here she has a job at NovaSphere and she sees the routing rules. She has things people in this room actually want.

She walks slowly toward the center of the room.

There are maybe thirty avatars present. The ambient noise is a low murmur of overlapping technical conversations.

Philippa is holding court near the back.

Her avatar is the same as it was before: severe, tall, unadorned. She is listening to someone describe a feedback failure.

She doesn't approach Philippa immediately. She needs to understand how Ruth moves in this space before she pushes the investigation. She needs to know the boundaries of her own cover.

She pulls up a gray block that serves as a chair near a group of three users.

They are discussing the new firmware update.

"It's a memory leak," one says, a woman in a stylized cyber-punk skin. "Every time you cross a server boundary, it fails to dump the cache from the previous environment. Play long enough, and the rig just freezes."

"It's not just freezing," a man argues. "People are getting stuck in the transition white-out. For minutes."

She listens. She doesn't speak. She lets the technical jargon wash over her, mapping the conversation. She isn't just following the jargon. She knows the architecture they're trying to describe. She knows exactly why the cache isn't dumping. She saw the routing rule syntax on Ruth's work monitor this morning. They hardcoded a bypass to prevent the servers from logging the dissociation events, but in doing so, they created a bottleneck in the memory allocation.

She knows the answer to their argument. She doesn't say it. It would be strange, coming from Ruth. A support tech wouldn't track architecture at that level.

She watches Philippa. The moderator commands the space effortlessly. When Philippa shifts her weight, the people around her adjust their posture.

A woman with a blue-skinned avatar approaches Philippa, speaks quietly, and hands over a file. Philippa takes it, nods, and the woman walks away.

This isn't a discussion board. It's a clearinghouse.

She sits in the chair for two hours. The digital environment demands nothing. Nobody needs juice. Nobody needs to be held. Her physical body is on a dipping mattress behind a locked door in Jersey City. She is somewhere else.

Eventually, the internal clock tells her it's time. Jacob will be waking up soon. Mia will be hungry.

She stands up.

"Catch you later, Ruth," the man in the leather jacket says as she walks past.

"Yeah. See you."

She brings up the navigation menu.

She hits disconnect.

The basement room shatters into pixels. The white-out hits.

She opens her eyes.

The ceiling of the bedroom is stained with a faint yellow ring of old water damage. The vinyl blinds rattle against the window frame.

She reaches up and pulls the heavy visor off.

The cold air of the apartment hits her face. The physical weight crashes back down. Her lower back throbs. The breasts are heavy again, the tissue starting to ache with the steady, relentless production of milk.

She lies there for a minute, staring at the water stain.

She can hear Jacob moving in the living room. The sound of a plastic truck hitting the wall.

She sits up. She puts the headset on the nightstand.

She walks out of the bedroom, unlocks the heavy brass deadbolt, and steps back into the noise.